


Green Waters

by Halcyon_Morpho_Menelaus



Category: Free!
Genre: Childhood Memories, First Meetings, Friendship, M/M, Makoto's Birthday Exchange 2013, friendship fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 20:18:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halcyon_Morpho_Menelaus/pseuds/Halcyon_Morpho_Menelaus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As a child, Haruka had thought he knew the water. He had thought he knew the colors, the feelings, the sensations, and everything else it had to offer worth experiencing, but a chance meeting made him realize how little he actually knew. A chance meeting with a certain pair of green eyes that even after all these years kept reminding him of how much he had left to learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Green Waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [risotto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/risotto/gifts).



> This is for Risotto, and was written for the 2013 Makoto Tachibana Birthday Fanworks Exchange. 
> 
> I hope this is what you were looking for! Re-reading it, I think It might come off a little shippy, but I do think it can be read in a very platonic light!
> 
> Prompt: Basically, the first time Haru and Makoto meet each other, from Haru's point of view. Can be him thinking of it or happening "in real time."

It had always bothered Haruka that the beauty people found in water was in the fleetingly perfect moments that never quite captured the full scope of its beauty. People tended to find loveliness only in a river’s crystalline reflections of indigo skies, or the movement of a grey-silk sea in the throes of a storm. They loved white-walled waterfalls and puddles on concrete after a rainstorm. Haruka adored these things as well, but none of them quite matched how deeply he loved the dark, encompassing vastness of the sea, a place of being he loved with a sense of knowing he felt in the depth of his heart.

He loved the cerulean world that deepened in color, pressure, and comfort the further down one went. He could never quite understand why people found its silence so lonely. Perhaps he had been in the deep for too long to truly understand what life above the surface felt like, but Haruka had always felt perfectly fine being by himself. It was not necessarily something he chose, but after experiencing it for so long it had simply felt like a natural state. He had always reasoned that one did not necessarily need others to feel whole. For most of his childhood, he had been content not to see beauty and brilliance in others, but rather in the place he felt safest. People were nice to have in one’s life, sure, and he certainly loved his grandmother dearly, but he found the isolation water provided more invigorating than any one person.  

That was, of course, until Makoto.

Almost as if he could sense Haruka thinking about him, the boy in question paused before bringing a clump of rice to his mouth and shot Haruka a questioning look. Haruka blinked, mildly embarrassed at being caught staring, and turn his head towards to the small box of fried mackerel before him. Wordlessly, he picked up a slice with his chopsticks and continued to eat.

He could not see it, but Haruka could sense that Makoto had started to smile softly at him. He could hear it in the boy’s voiced when he asked teasingly, “You’re thinking about something very serious, aren’t you, Haru?”

Makoto opened up a second box of food from the assortment laid out before them on the table. His mother had packed them for the boys’ weekend excursion to the mall. Neither had planned on bringing anything, but once they told Makoto’s mother they were going to be gone all day, she had insisted on packing them some lunches. It wasn’t until the boys had decided to take a break from shopping and open up the food that they realized just how grateful they were for her foresight. Makoto gathered a small bundle of noodles with his chopsticks and held it up as a small offering.

“Not particularly,” Haruka answered guardedly as he took the food from Makoto’s chopsticks with his own. He glanced up, and the moment he did the shine of Makoto’s eyes brought to the forefront of his mind the feelings he had been mulling over.

Makoto said something to him in a teasing tone, but Haruka did not have the presence of mind to decipher his words. He was too focused on how the rays of the afternoon sun illuminated his friend’s bright mood and made his eyes shine. Haruka always found Makoto’s eyes distracting when he looked that way. Haruka would fall into those eyes, crashing, and be drug away to a place just beyond the horizon he had never glimpsed, and might never actually arrive at, but was drug there nonetheless. It was this feeling of being taken away into silence that made Haruka always want to look, because it always reminded him of his favorite place. Perhaps here, on the opposite end of this person’s eyes, _was_ his favorite place: the water. _No,_ Haruka thought quickly, _that’s strange, isn’t it._ It was strange, he was sure, but he could not tell why it was strange or why he felt it should be. Had he ever felt this way before? Had he ever felt this peculiar, lost, drifting feeling that came over him whenever he looked into Makoto’s eyes? He was sure he had, and though he did not want to think about it, his mind wouldn’t let the feelings go. He’d been here before, he’d felt this before, and while the memory was vague and full of scattered pieces, Haruka found little trouble in latching on to it. He knew they would offer up no explanation to why he was captivated, but it did not stop his memories from bringing him to the first time he saw the gentle emeralds that shined before him.

 

 

The memory, for all the drawing power it had over him, was quite fuzzy. He could not remember scenery, or smells, or sights as clearly as he would have liked. What Haruka remembered most clearly about the moments before he met the person that would become a centerpiece of his life, was that there was, in fact, nothing truly stunning had happened. It was ironic, he supposed, but a part of him liked to imagine that it was merely the buildup to something powerful and confusing that even now he had difficulty classifying.  

Details escaped him, but Haruka knew he had been around four at the time. It had been a normal, lazy, relaxed weekend and his grandmother had decided that they should have lunch by the ocean. They had packed two full cases of mackerel at Haruka’s insistence, and Haruka had worn actual clothes over his swimming trunks at his grandmother’s insistence. He remembered holding a bundle of blankets in one hand and his grandmother's hand tightly in the other. Together, they had walked along the edge of the winding street in front of the house with their sandaled feet clapping against the sundrenched pavement. Haruka could not clearly remember his grandmother’s face or what she said to him that particular day as they made their way down the avenues and onto the warm sand, but he remembered the cloud-studded sky that did nothing to deter the warm rays of heat. He remembered that he watched the ocean the minute he could see it, and as always, he had been mesmerized. He could not see a connection between the sun, sky and the sea – they were separated by a white line of glistening crystals that ran over the shore like loosed diamonds and crashed into the air like a rain of marbles.

He had stopped to stare, as he almost always did at that age, and his grandmother had gently tugged him along to their favorite eating place. It was an area of about six different tables on a raised platform that could be reached by stairs that led down to the sand. Haruka could not remember if there had been people on the beach, but he clearly remembered the sounds of happy, light and polite laughter as he and his grandmother had made their way up the stairs. They had stopped the moment they reached the top, and he remembered feeling his grandmother’s hesitation as she saw the family that occupied their favorite table. A tall, brunette man with glasses sat next to a woman with a gentle smile and dark brown, almost green, hair. At the woman’s side, with his back to the ocean, sat a small boy who Haruka gave a cursory glance before turning his gaze back to the sea.

The family looked up all at the same time and the woman gave a warm, pleasant smile while the man voiced a: “Hello, how are you both?”

His grandmother replied just as warmly, but Haruka could not remember what was said. He could only recall pleasantries between his grandmother and the strangers being exchanged before he was tugged towards the table, at the couple’s insistence that he and his grandmother join them for their lunch. Haruka remembered feeling mildly miffed at the notion of spending an afternoon with others. While his socially designated eating companion was happy about the thought of a new friend, Haruka was much less so.

The moment Haruka sat down, the boy introduced himself in a tone that was as earnest as it was excited. “Hello, I’m Makoto, Makoto Tachibana, what’s your name?”

Haruka looked up immediately, surprised at how easily Makoto had managed to introduce himself despite having such an embarrassing name. Haruka felt his name was just as bad, but while he’d eventually learn to live with it, he could never exactly be proud to announce it to someone. When he spoke, his voice was calm and firm: “Haruka Nanase.”

Makoto made a surprised noise that transformed into one of happiness. “You’re just like me, then!” he remarked, smiling, “Even though we’re both boys, I’ve got a girly name too.”

Haruka remembered turning his head away at that comment so Makoto wouldn’t see his slight blush. If he noticed it, Makoto didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he reached forward and pulled a small bento box towards himself and opened the cover. As he started to eat, he began to ask Haruka a series of questions with the same honest fervency with which he introduced himself. “That’s your grandmother, right? You came to spend the day with her?”

Haruka nodded as he pulled his own box of mackerel out of the small bag he had carried. Haruka remembered hearing the adults talk, laugh occasionally and mention the two boys, but he could not for the life of him remember any specifics of their conversations. In fact, he could barely remember the crash of the waves along the shore over the strength of the memory of Makoto’s youthful voice.

“I live with her right now,” Haruka continued, “so we decided to spend the day at the beach together.” There was a momentary silence, and Haruka felt that he should have filled it by asking Makoto what his plans at the beach with his family were. He wanted to speak, and started to, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to. His desire and intent was present, but the words were lost in his mouth.

Once more, if Makoto thought Haruka was being strange, he didn’t let it show, and thankfully for Haruka he took it upon himself to answer the unvoiced question. “I’m here with my parents. At breakfast this morning, my dad said, ‘What a beautiful day!’ or something, and said the day was too nice for us not to eat outside.”

Haruka nodded again, understandingly, as he recalled his grandmother saying much the same thing. He opened up his own box and started to very carefully pick his way at the best strips of meat with his chopsticks.

Makoto asked him various questions about his grandmother, his life, and every time Haruka gave an answer he was steadily more impressed at Makoto’s ability to detect what kind of questions Haruka wanted to ask in return but found difficulty in voicing. Sometimes he was a little off, but Makoto spoke with such genuine enthusiasm and understanding of Haruka’s quietness, that Haruka went with it and listened intently to everything the other boy said. They picked up a conversational rhythm, where the brief silences between them felt as much like bonding as the times where they spoke.

While Haruka had been quietly and steadily eating from one large container of mackerel, Makoto had been not only eating his own, but eating whatever small bites of food his mother occasionally put in his box with a murmur of, “eat up, darling, it’s been a long day.” Haruka had taken little to no notice of this practice, but a glistening, faintly yellow ring of fruit Makoto’s mother held out to him caught his eye.

It was a pineapple ring, and while Haruka couldn’t remember the exact image of it, he distinctly remembered his mouth watering slightly at the thought of eating it. Makoto took the slice from his mother and gently laid it to the side of his food to be eaten a little later. Haruka stared at it for a long moment before noticing how silent their edge of the table had gotten. He glanced up and saw Makoto staring at him, and Haruka blushed slightly before immediately turning his head and shoveling a few strips of mackerel into his mouth.

From the corner of his eye he saw Makoto smile and let out a breathy laugh before leaning over and looking at Haruka’s box. “You sure do have a lot of mackerel, don’t you?” he commented easily, and Haruka could hear the smile in his voice.

“It’s the best thing we had in the house.” Haruka said resolutely, if not the tiny bit defensively. “Plus, it’s the best thing to eat at the beach.”

There was no kind of reasonable logic to accompany that declaration, but Makoto only laughed good-naturedly. Haruka shot him a stubborn pout, but Makoto was looking at his food, his chopsticks hesitantly zigzagging over the food as he sought something specific. “Hmm, here, try this! You looked like you liked it.” Makoto picked up the pineapple slice his mother had given him and held it up for Haruka to take.

Haruka started, shocked, and then looked at Makoto’s face, and Haruka remembered that as the moment when everything changed.

Haruka remembered looking up and seeing the sandy beach behind Makoto, then the glimmering white sea, and then when his eyes rose to Makoto’s face, he saw the sea once more, but in a decidedly greener color.

Even in a crowd, it’s relatively easy to pick out one’s loved ones, parents, and close friends. Even if there’s hundreds of thousands of distractors, the familiarity that those people hold is something that is almost intuitive and extremely difficult to confuse with something else. Haruka had always considered water an entity of importance on par with that of the people in his life, but he couldn’t find beauty in his grandmother or parents, and if he could not find it in them he was sure he could not find it in other people. Yet, here it was. The familiarity of the sea he had been fascinated with for as long as he could remember lived in the eyes of the boy sitting right next to him. He could see the same intensity, the same power, the same invigorating forcefulness, but the clearest similarity of all was the _depth._ It was as if he could travel into them for years and never reach the bottom.

Yet for all its familiarity, the differences struck him like a blow. Makoto’s eyes were gentle without losing their strength. The youthful enthusiasm in his expression made them shimmer with unadulterated joy in a way Haruka had never seen before. Most of all, though, was the infused warmth of his gaze. Haruka had always felt a strange sort of comfort from water, and while it could occasionally be inviting, it had never truly felt _warm_ to him before. That had been fine, he had never expected it to, but the soft warmth that radiated from Makoto’s eyes made Haruka momentarily rethink everything he had felt about the water. How had he never known it could be so warm? How could this view be so different than what he’d always known? Had he been wrong, or just naïve, all this time?

The colors of midday and the colors of sunset were most certainly different, but it was all the sky. Intrinsically, it was the same thing, just colored different, but that didn’t negate the different feelings, emotions and responses each elicited from the viewer. Perhaps that was what was happening here, though Haruka was far too young at the time to rationalize or even consciously realize this. Were they the same place, after all, the water and this person’s eyes? Or were they just two parts of the same thing? Did he see the same thing in this person’s eyes, just colored differently? Makoto was the water Haruka had always known and been fascinated with, but he was also so different. He was far different, but intrinsically the same, and these conflicting perceptions were more than Haruka felt he could come to terms with at the time.

“Makoto,” Haruka said suddenly, forcefully, without thinking or even realizing that he had spoken until Makoto looked at him questioningly.

“Yeah, Haru?”

The familiar shortening of his name shocked Haruka out of his trance, and though it was mildly irritating and more than a little embarrassing, for that moment, that one moment, he let it pass. “Hey, do you live around here?”

Makoto blinked, confused at not only the question but the urgency with which it was asked. “Well, yeah, I just moved around here. You know the shrine around here near the top of the hill? I live at the house near the bottom of the steps leading up to it.”

Haruka paused in surprise before continuing in a tone that he would most certainly have denied was excitable, “I live right by there, except my house is at the very top of the stairs, right past the first gate.”

Makoto’s expression did another transformation, and just like before, it became one of joy. “Really? We’re practically neighbors, then! We should do some things together. Maybe we’ll even be in the same class at school, don’t you think?”

Haruka knew he wasn’t smiling, but he could feel it somewhere in his heart and he hoped Makoto could see it just as clearly as he could hear the words Haruka couldn’t speak. He wasn’t sure why, but he wanted to know more about his young new neighbor. Why was he so like the thing he had always loved, but at the same time so different? He wanted to see just how deep Makoto’s eyes went, and for the first time in his life and for a long time to come, Haruka wanted to know another human being, and like the clicking together of a final puzzle piece, he knew nothing would ever stand in his way of finding out everything he possibly could.

 

 

Haruka fiddled with his mackerel absently, realizing that he had never, in the past fourteen years, actually come close to figuring out the thing he had set out to discover so long ago.

“Something is missing, isn’t it?” Makoto asked suddenly in the same type of mock serious tone.

Haruka glanced at him, taking a moment to realize they were playing their small game again. He looked down pointedly at his mackerel, and after a moment Makoto uttered a small, “aha! Of course!” and flicked open the lid of one of the boxes in the center of their picnic table. “Haru is thinking, _I’ve run out of pineapples for my mackerel,_ right?” Makoto made a small face at the word ‘pineapples,’ for even after all these years he still didn’t understand why Haruka liked to eat them _with_ his mackerel instead of separately. Regardless, like all the other strange things his best friend did, Makoto just went with it.  

“Here, Haru,” Makoto held out a pineapple ring on the end of his chopsticks.

Haruka paused momentarily before reaching out to take the piece of fruit with his own eating utensils. His eyes quickly flickered from the fruit to Makoto’s eyes before Haruka felt himself smile ever so softly. The brunette made a surprised noise at the unexpected expression, and it made Haruka’s smile deepen slightly. It was slightly embarrassing, and years ago Haruka would have turned his head if he’d ever even let his smile through in the first place, but the past few months had changed his opinion on some matters. It was fine this time, he decided, if he showed a little more appreciation than normal, because when he changed he could see all the new and interesting ways Makoto reacted. While Haruka felt like he himself was changing, it never seemed that way with Makoto. It merely seemed like he was discovering new things he’d never been able to before.

Haruka knew he might never know how deep Makoto’s eyes went, and something inside him told him that was just fine. The journey to the bottom, whether or not there even was a bottom, would be more than enough for him.  

**Author's Note:**

> All your prompts were incredibly awesome, (I actually really want to do all of them at some point in the near future) but for now I hope I did right by this one! This whole exchange has been a blast, and I hope you had fun with it too. Enjoy the rest of Makoto's Birthday!


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